Inbox Zero means I care more about the outbox than the inbox. It means I choose to focus my time, energy, and attention on creating something worthwhile instead of feeding some unhealthy addiction to constantly check my inboxes. Pressing the Get New Mail button or refreshing my Twitter stream is like pulling the crank on a slot machine. Did I win? No. Did I win? No.
posts
On Nokia
Nokia’s problem — and I’ve heard this same story from at least half a dozen former and present Nokia employees who read DF — is that their handset business is fundamentally based around hardware teams. When they decide to make a phone, they put together a hardware team for that model, and that team makes all decisions. That’s why they have no cohesive software strategy. Nokia sees software as one component in a hardware-based view of the industry.
On Application Addiction
There’s a point in any Mac junkie’s life when you have to stop and admit you have a problem.
For some people, it’s photo editing apps. They switch from Aperture to LightRoom back to Aperture and then to something I probably have never heard of because it’s open source and all the cool kids are doing it.
For others it’s GTD apps where the quest to streamline their work flow and to get more done generally ends in disaster when they spend eight hours trying to figure out what context and application to put “walk the dog” in.
On iPad Rivals and Stupid Blog Posts
“To-Be-Shipped” still seems to be the status on any iPad rivals. This means that the iPad is still the only device in its class, which is good news for Apple, and for the folks who own the device too. For the consumers, it means that there will still be developers focusing on making amazing apps for them to make their iPad even more useful!
While I agree that there are no real competitors to the iPad at this point, her article only points out two oddball clamshell devices that don’t stand a chance of doing well — or ever being produced, in Lenovo’s case.
Newspaper Subscriptions Coming to iPad?
John Boudreau at Mercury News:
Apple is expected to announce soon a new subscription plan for newspapers, which hope tablets like the iPad will eventually provide a new source of profits as media companies struggle with declining print circulation and advertising revenue.
In short, Apple may do to newspapers what they did to the music industry. I don’t see a lot of newspapers being willing to give Apple 30% of their profits from this, but do they really have much of a choice?
On Writing and Notational Velocity
Justin Blanton explains how he writes on the Mac. It’s a great setup, and the same thing I use, except the TextMate bit. I prefer writing directly in Notational Velocity.
As he mentions it in his footnote, Notational Velocity can store it’s files (as plain text files) in any folder, including a folder in your Dropbox. I store mine there as a second-tier sync, knowing I can get to my stuff, even if Simplenote is down.
Apple Ships iOS 4.2 Beta 1
What a Difference Ten Years Makes
Macworld’s Benj Edwards has a great look back at Mac OS X Public Beta, released ten years go:
When users got their hands on the Public Beta, reviews were mixed but optimistic. It was obvious that OS X represented a promising future for Apple, but the company still had a long way to go in terms of producing a fully mature OS. Apple collected bug reports and ideas for its new beta through an Internet-enabled suggestion box in the Apple menu.
How the new Nano was Designed
Hilarious. And sad.
Star Wars Propaganda Posters
iLounge Reviews the iPod nano
Jeremy Horwitz, on the new iPod nano:
More than most of Apple’s iPods—and certainly the majority of its iPod nanos—the sixth-generation iPod nano is a love it or hate it addition to the family, dropping so many of the capabilities of its predecessors that it’s hard to take seriously as a sequel. Haters will seize upon the omissions, the unchanged price tag, and the lack of true multi-touch functionality as reasons to pass on the nano, and we can’t say that we’d blame them; this would certainly be the first nano we’d have skipped, and as our limited recommendation suggests, we’d expect that most of our readers will do the same. There are enough of last year’s nanos floating around at lower prices to make this one extremely easy to forget; our editors all agreed that we would have felt differently if this was a $99 model; there’s just not enough here to justify these prices.
iPhone 4 Case Program Ending Sept. 30
We now know that the iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than we originally thought. A small percentage of iPhone 4 users need a case, and we want to continue providing them a Bumper case for free. For everyone else, we are discontinuing the free case program on all iPhone 4s sold after September 30, 2010. We are also returning to our normal returns policy for all iPhone 4s sold after September 30. Users experiencing antenna issues should call AppleCare to request a free Bumper case.